


At the End of Our Errors

by felix814



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Azkaban, Canon-Typical Racism, Canon-Typical Violence, Imprisonment, Letters, M/M, Mental Instability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28273353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/felix814/pseuds/felix814
Summary: Regulus survives the cave only to be arrested following Voldemort’s death and incarcerated in Azkaban.
Relationships: Regulus Black & Remus Lupin, Regulus Black & Sirius Black, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: HP Holiday Fic Exchange





	At the End of Our Errors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Val_Creative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Val_Creative/gifts).



> I hope I fulfilled this prompt correctly. There were a lot of tropes from the request that I didn't manage to include, but one of them was Imprisoned in a Tower, so I thought: Azkaban! and just ran with it.

Regulus shivered. The cell was cold. The wall he was leaning against was rough and uncomfortable. He felt the absence of his magic with a painful intensity; it was like his stomach had been cut open and his entrails pulled out. He couldn’t do any magic, here, none at all, not even a _lumos_. It was unbearable.

On the other side of the corridor, something stirred. There was a sound of shifting cloth, of flesh moving over stone. He waited for it, for anything, to speak, but there was nothing. 

Regulus turned his face to the wall. He didn’t want to look. His trial had been mercifully brief, in the end. Veritaserum and the dim candles, the larger part of the assembled Wizengamot hidden behind flicking light. Their voices had risen and fell like a distant tide, unrecognizable. And then it was over and he was guilty.

Now there was someone beyond his cell, waiting. Taunting. “Leave me,” Regulus said wearily. “I am not well.” 

The small sounds stopped. In their wake, memory and sensation flooded back and he shuddered. You are worthless, he thought. The last hope of a great house, and you failed them. You are weak. You bought nothing with your treason, you gained nothing, and now we are dead, everyone is dead, dead, and gone.

He closed his eyes. He was close to sobbing. “I am a Black,” he whispered. “You cannot persecute me this way.”

A moment’s silence.

“Don’t you know where the _fuck_ you are?”

In shock, Regulus opened his eyes, turned his head. Through the bars of his door he saw a cell on the opposite side of the corridor. Sirius was crouched against his own barred door, breathing low and staring with wide eyes at his brother.

***************

It was a curious experience, the cessation of happiness. Regulus thought tentatively that it might be more terrible to someone who had more regularly experienced joy in the course of their life; you could become habituated to the feeling, he supposed.

As his first few days, weeks, and then months in Azakan slid past with depressing regularity, Regulus considered that the worst part of his new existence was having to share it with his older brother.

Sirius was not doing well. At first, he had seemed to derive some satisfaction from seeing Regulus in the same prison as himself, and had followed the beginning of each new day with one remark or another about the viciousness of the Death Eaters, the vile corruption of Lord Voldemort, or the stupidity of Regulus himself for becoming entangled in the terrorist plots.

That had not been particularly pleasant or easy to ignore, but it had been doable. The vitriol, however, had at length given way to longer and more disturbing periods of despair: Sirius slumped in a heap on the floor for hours, crying pitifully at the window, looking blank-faced and exhausted at the wall. Or being in the form of that bloody dog.

It had been a particularly annoying episode, Regulus remembered, when Sirius had first transformed in front of him. Beyond the more immediate concerns of his brother being an illegal animagus and not telling him, thoughts coming in tandem with the more quiet and secret frustration that of _course_ , this was how he had slipped behind their guard, back when Regulus had been an earnest Death Eater in good standing and yet could never quite measure up to the infiltrative prowess of the members of the Order of the Phoenix . . . he thought: a dog. How dreadfully common. 

He glowered now at the recumbent form of the animal, panting lowly next to the close wall of its cell. Dogs were such disgustingly servile creatures; what proper animagus form was that for a Black?

Sirius had not been human in twenty-eight days. He had been counting.

It was enough to move him to some form of action, as limited as his options for that were, these days. “Sirius,” he hissed, voice hoarse and thready.

No response.

“Sirius!”

Nothing.

“You are a disgrace to our family,” he tried, without much hope of success. Such things had been said to Sirius before by witches and wizards of far more power and presence than he, namely, their mother. 

“Come back,” he said, finally, not knowing what else to say. “Come back to me. You must.”

A long, heartbreaking pause. Then: “Why?”

Regulus felt--not happy, not in the slightest, but calmed somewhat, as he peered through the bars of his cage and saw Sirius in human form, thin and pale, hair falling lank around his face. He looked as revolting as Regulus did himself, no doubt.

He needed to say something; keep Sirius present. “I worry about you,” he said sullenly, not even knowing if it were true or not. 

“No-one worries about traitors. No-one misses me.”

Regulus paused. He really did not know what to make of his brother’s strange and persistent claim of being a traitor to Dumbeldore’s cause. It did not fit--made no sense. But here he was, so it must have been true, after all. “It doesn’t matter,” he said eventually. “What you did, for whom. These things pass.”

There was no verbal response from the other cell but Regulus saw Sirius’ eyes focused on him. He looked half-asleep, wretched.

“It was civil war,” Regulus went on, warming slightly to his theme. “We chose the wrong side, that’s all. It was a mistake, a terrible one. It cost us our _House_.” This caused a terrible pang in his heart and for a moment he could not draw breath. We are already dead, he thought. Dead and gone, there is no saving the Blacks. I have brought us to ruin. “Who you served--believed in--it passes into history. But I’m here.” There was a tremble in his voice, which he hated, and thought: this could reach him. This could help. “I’m still your brother.”

“My brother’s dead,” Sirius said dully.

“Not yet,” Regulus murmured. “Although, give it a year--”

“I meant _James_.”

Words choked and died in Regulus’ throat. He swallowed and turned his face away. He didn’t think it was possible to become more wretched. Misery and fury churned his empty stomach as he sat, face pressed against the cold stone. As long as he was miserable, no reason Sirius shouldn’t be as well.

“Several of your brothers are still alive and well, then. Me, the werewolf, Peter Pettigrew--”

The barred door of the other cell thudded as Sirius apparently threw his weight against it, raging. “Don’t you fucking dare! That worm, that disgusting, pathetic, murderous rat!”

“You called him brother once,” Regulus pointed out. “Then again, you used to call me by that name. These bonds are discarded rather lightly for you, aren’t they?”

Heavy breathing from the other cell, which turned into low whimpers. Regulus wearily turned his head to look. Sirius had transformed into the dog again, pressed against the bars, tail tucked close against his body for comfort.

“Coward,” he said softly.

***************

They had been seven months in the stinking cells of Azkaban before Regulus learned that Sirius had not, in fact, ever been in league with Lord Voldemort. 

It was surprisingly reassuring information, reaffirming as it did the notion of his brother as someone who, despite being sadly deficient in academic principles, had enough sense to want nothing to do with that revolting half-blood madman. 

The news that Sirius had been thrown in prison without so much as a trial was . . . less reassuring. On balance, Regulus did not know that he had even heard anything as horrifying. And yet these things happen, he told himself firmly. I have studied history; I know about necessary evils. In times of great duress, dangerous individuals can be constrained for the good of the wizarding public as a whole. This is only sensible, and individual rights of liberty are subject to the requirements of the state.

It was true, but a more challenging concept to support now that he was actually constrained, unfree. Now that one of the victims of this policy was his brother.

It became more and more difficult to resist the siren call at the back of his mind, the one telling him that the last hope of the Blacks was not yet gone. He could revive us, he thought. With Sirius free, we could stand once more, a power to be reckoned with. If Sirius could be freed--if Sirius could be reasoned with, and brought to a proper understanding of how things ought to be.

It seemed unlikely. Azkaban, with all its petty miseries and indignities, had not managed to make Sirius one whit less tractable, Regulus thought sourly. He certainly seemed most unwilling to listen to anything Regulus had to say, on the grounds of his own, significantly mild, crimes while in the service of Lord Voldemort. 

“They were only muggles,” he said defensively.

The response was immediate and merciless. “You’re a fucking idiot if you think that makes a difference.”

Regulus hissed, clinging to the familiar pattern of argument. “There are millions of them, all over the planet. Do you know how few of us there are? Our declining birth rates, wizards marrying into muggle communities . . .”

“And making half-bloods; sorry, _what_ was your point? That we aren’t doing enough to propagate the wizarding species or that because there are more muggles than us, they don’t matter?”

“Both,” he said sulkily. 

“Right. So your logic is: if there is a minority group within a larger population--like witches and wizards in the world--they deserve more rights?”

Regulus scowled. “And then you’ll say that this is like the mudbloods--”

“It’s exactly like that! They’re a minority in England.”

“They won’t be, if we keep breeding out of our own class for generations more.”

Sirius was quiet for a moment. Regulus hoped that he had been struck dumb with the good sense of his own argument.

“So . . . you believe that muggleborns come from wizarding families? That the magic reoccurs in a line after a few squibs and muggles?”

Regulus bit his lip and took refuge in academic caution. “I don’t know. There isn’t enough evidence to say one way or another.”

“What other way? You don’t seriously think that the muggleborn _steal_ magic from wizards?”

Regulus pushed his hand against his mouth and thought. It was a very comforting notion, and it did seem to make sense, on the face of it. Squibs were born into wizarding families at about the same rate as mudbloods were born into muggle families. That there was some kind of transfer of power happening--it was logical. Except there was, as he was forced to acknowledge, no real evidence to support this theory.

“Well?” Sirius was impatient. “Regulus. Reg. _Reg_.”

“I don’t know!” Regulus snapped. He felt foolish but there was no other answer to make. 

I am failing at this, he thought tiredly. Even if we manage to get Sirius free, to tell the world he was innocent--what will he do, as Lord Black? Invite the corruption of the half-bloods and mudbloods into our House, as the Potter heir did? Consign centuries of wizarding tradition to the dust?

What am I doing here, he thought, and for the first time considered whether it would really make any difference at all if he lay down in his bed, refused all food, and resigned himself to death. As so many Azkaban residents had done before him.

“Thanks.”

Regulus looked up, bewildered. 

“You know, I don’t think--I’ve never heard you say that before.”

“What?” Regulus managed, tongue thick with surprise.

“That you didn’t know. I mean, it’s not enough, but it’s a start.”

Regulus sat on the cold stone floor, unsure of what to think, feeling vaguely insulted and warmed all at once. The minutes ticked past. The Black brothers breathed, loud in the still, vacant air.

“Do you think killing those muggles was wrong?”

Regulus thought he understood what Sirius wanted him to say. It wasn’t wrong, he thought. It wasn’t anything. They were just---politically inconvenient. Needed to be quietly removed for the sake of the public, for the common good. This is simply history, imposing its necessary demands.

But it was true that he had misread the political situation, misread Voldemort. Not our Saviour, he remembered. The blood of countless pureblood families was on his hands. Did it start with me? Did I misunderstand the necessity? Not enough evidence, he thought with conviction. 

“I don’t know,” he said, finally.

Sirius was quiet, for a moment. “All right,” he said.

***************

For some reason, it became easier, after that. They talked and planned, civilly more often than not. Regulus was convinced that the Ministry would send representatives up to their lonely corridor, at one time or another. “We’re Blacks,” he kept saying, desperately. “They can’t simply lock us up and throw away the key.” Sirius was unhappily pessimistic in his predictions of disaster. “They can,” he would say. “They will.” 

Still, they talked, and if happiness was beyond the abilities of both, Regulus found a certain doleful peace, thinking of Sirius’ escape from Azkaban.

Sirius did not seem at all peaceful, and apparently found no middle path between flat despair and frenetic rage.

“Peter must be hiding somewhere,” he kept saying, practically frothing at the mouth. “If I can get out, find him.”

“Yes,” said Regulus patiently. “If he wasn’t also an animagus, and a rat, and able to hide virtually everywhere, you might be able to find him.” 

“Or get a message out to Remus,” his brother said, not listening. “He’d know what to do. He’d find Peter, get a confession, get me out.” 

“The werewolf,” Regulus said with a small sneer. It felt good. He at least knew where he stood with creatures like that.

Sirius breathed roughly against the bars, his right hand clenched against the stone wall of his cell, and eyes fixed coldly on his brother. “Look at me.”

Regulus watched him from underneath a curtain of dank, unwashed hair, and said nothing.

“Look at me.”

“I am,” he hissed.

“You say anything--you say anything about Remus, I’ll make you sorry.”

Regulus huffed out a small, mirthless laugh. “Exactly what do you imagine yourself capable of, in your situation?”

Sirius looked at him a long moment. “I won’t talk to you anymore.”

“Yes, you will.”

“I won‘t.”

“This is unbelievably childish, even for you.”

“I won’t talk to you, I won’t respond to you, I’ll sit in my cell and pretend you don’t exist.”

You did that before, Regulus thought savagely. It’s how you always treated me; shut in your room and refusing to let me in and pretending you didn’t hear me when I spoke, don’t you remember? I’m used to it. Nevertheless, Regulus found that he was irrationally terrified at the thought. 

“We have to talk; you need me to get you out of here.”

“As long as you don’t say anything about Remus.”

“Merlin and Morgana, why should it matter? Am I forced to remind you that until not so very recently, you thought he had defected to the Dark Lord!”

Suddenly, to Regulus’ horror, Sirius gripped the bars of his cell with his hands and swung his head against the iron. Blood spurted from a gash in his forehead. “I was wrong,” he cried. “I was wrong, I was wrong--”

“All right,” said Regulus, panicking. “I won’t, I promise.”

His brother was screaming. “I _did it_ , I’m sorry, so sorry! James, I’m _sorry_!”

I’ll get you out, Regulus thought. Whatever comes after, I can help you. I can save you.

Over in the next cell, Sirius was begging James to forgive him. Regulus shut his eyes and covered his ears against the sound.

***************

In the end, it was far less complicated than Regulus had imagined. There were, after all, wizard guards and Aurors visiting Azkaban on a semi-regular basis, if only to check the security wards and ensure each inmate was still as wretched as possible. 

Dementors could perform many tasks in their role as wardens, but they have no real magic. It was perhaps the bitterest torture Regulus had yet experienced, seeing the guard, an unknown wizard who seemed himself profoundly nervous of his surroundings, grip his wand and light his way through the dim corridor with a word. 

He did not look at the prisoners in their cell, or speak to them, but when Regulus, desperate not to miss the chance, clasped the bars of his door and whispered loudly: 

“Tell Dumbledore--the horcruxes! I know how the Dark Lord will come back!”, the man did jump, and move uneasily to the far wall. Regulus could not catch his eyes, but he knew he was heard. 

The wizard moved on, to the next floor. And all they had to do was to wait. 

For weeks, as it later transpired, for the old man to appear, calm and gravely thoughtful. Dumbledore had paused outside the door to Sirius’ cell and looked in on him, sorrowfully. There was something in his expression which communicated regret and pity, a worse condemnation than anger, Regulus considered. 

Sirius had whimpered at the look, muttered ‘James,’ and put his head in his hands. 

Regulus, with his every nerve tensed for the conversation, had found himself curiously angry on his brother’s behalf, and disgusted with his apparent servility before his own self-proclaimed Lord, for whom he had fought against his own family. The scene was redolent of unpleasant memories.

But Dumbledore had turned from Sirius to Regulus and with a mild expression asked, “And did you have something to tell me, Mr Black?”

“It’s not a trick,” Regulus had said, trying to sound as dignified as possible. “I know how to kill him--for good this time--but you have to do something for me.”

The old man had smiled formally and rubbed his bearded chin. “I am, alas, not in the position of rendering service to Death Eaters.”

“Sirius was never a Death Eater,” Regulus had said.

“Never,” whispered his brother, half-dead, half-mad, full of grief.

Regulus took a breath, thought of being saved, thought: I could ask for my own freedom. I have the bargaining chip, the thing he wants. But he was a loyal brother and there was only one choice.

“And all I’m asking for is the trial Sirius never had.”

With a few words, the thing was done.

***************

Things changed after Sirius was gone. Most immediately, Regulus’ life took a sharp turn for the worse. He had not fully appreciated, during the months that his brother had languished in the opposite cell, how beneficial his presence had been in distracting him from the brutal miseries of his existence. It hadn’t been especially pleasant, raking over the family history and enduring Sirius’ grief over his blood traitor friend, but planning Sirius’ release had given him purpose.

It had been nice to think, for a while, that he could do something constructive. Now, the days stretched agonizingly ahead in endless paces and at the same time seemed to pass like clouds across the sun. He no longer registered the weeks, when they carried with them no change of routine, no reprieve for the dragging blankness of the prison. Crammed into one corner of his cell, watching the sky and feeling the ever-baleful presence of the dementors sweep through the corridors on patrol, he even lost his sense of the seasons passing. 

One day, a small yellow flower appeared on the rocky beach far below. It looked like the only piece of colour in the world, and for hour upon hour Regulus kept his eyes pinned to the tiny, gently waving blossom. It was a reminder that things did change, in the outside world. Perhaps it was a daffodil, or a crocus. Perhaps it was spring, somewhere.

At some point he slept, and the next time he opened his eyes the flower had gone. Probably a dementor had uprooted it, or one of the few human guards, none of whom ever strayed beyond the lower floor. Possibly beauty was illegal, in this place. 

He thought he was in there months, but it could have been years. He slept, and cried, and forgot about life outside Azkaban.

And then one day, a letter arrived. 

He couldn’t understand it at first. There was no owl--would owls fly here? What wouldn’t he give for the familiar sight of a bird flocking to the tower with the mail delivery--and this letter simply appeared near the barred door of his cell one day, in the same place where the food always arrived.

It was the strangest thing he had ever seen. The ink on the envelope was black, and the handwriting was sloped and untidy. He picked it up with shaking fingers and noticed, absently, that his hands were black with grime, oily. Maybe he should wash them in the water bucket.

After a long time spent in amazed, careful study of the plain brown envelope, Regulus opened the letter and read: Dear Regulus. 

It was from Sirius.

***************

Apparently--and this was a terribly strange and yet hopeful thing in itself--Sirius had become interested in politics. 

There was blank parchment tucked into the envelope, and a rudimentary pencil, around which Regulus could just wrap his fingers enough to shakily write back:

I cannot believe that you are actually capable of wielding a power more subtle than your own wand.

The effort that cost, both in terms of physical strength and mental cogitation, left him drained for the rest of the day. The next morning, he woke with the feeble light, washed his hands carefully in the water bucket, and wrote again:

What are the extent of your plans for me?

Save me, Regulus thought, as he re-read the letter from Sirius (‘Sorry it took so long to write to you, Reg, but the Ministry was putting up a stupid fuss over the security concerns; now we can write, at least! Isn’t that something?’). You have proved you can do something, change something, so save me. I am a Black, I am your brother, you can _get me out_.

He waited day upon day for a messenger from the Ministry, an Auror carrying his wand, his clothes. When he dreamed at night, he dreamed in brightly coloured images of rescue, a return to his rightful place in the wizarding world, an official pardon (‘I talked to a lawyer, old Simpkins, you remember? About cutting down your sentence, but he didn’t seem that hopeful. For murder charges, they’re remaining pretty adamant’).

He made his cell a study, carefully placing each new letter in chronological order against one wall. Evidence, he thought vaguely. When I’m out, I can bring these to somebody’s attention, make formal complaints. Mostly written by Sirius, they were an ungainly mess of protestations, reminiscences and half-formed opinions about the current political climate which he treasured as he would a vial of _felix felicis_ (‘I miss you, little brother. I hate this house and all the ugly old ancestors in the portraits but it would be nice to see you here. You could help us with Harry, he’s growing up so fast’).

His own letters he worked at with feverish intensity, laying out arguments, suggesting schemes. Copying each out onto parchment scraps before creating clean versions, he often flicked back over the record of his time in Azkaban, post-Sirius. The first year, the second. When he caught a chill and suffered the aches and coughs of a protracted illness throughout an entire winter (‘I am well, although if you are committed to proposing reforms before the Wizengamot, I suggest maintenance of the tower walls, to seal the crevices that are open to the wind’).

He wrote, and read, and carefully tidied his cell. He sharpened the pencil against a piece of flint carefully prised out of the wall, and sent requests for quills and ink (‘It hardly seems like too much to ask; do they imagine I will run amok and stab the other inmates with the nib?’). 

The time passed, sparingly.

***************

Increasingly, the letters were not from Sirius. 

At first, Regulus chose not to read the letters from the werewolf. In truth, he was furious--coldly and viciously furious that Sirius, restored to honour and wealth and the family mansion, would invite into their home a half-feral creature, not worthy of recognition by a true wizard. They are mindlessly brutal, he thought with conviction, remembering Greyback. 

Those letters were pushed aside, hidden under a piece of stone. With a considerable show of fortitude, Regulus managed to leave them as they accumulated (one, two, four, six), unread for a period of nearly three months together, but at length succumbed to curiosity, and consented to think of Lupin as a necessary evil. 

Also, Sirius was a fairly wretched correspondent. His--companion--was far more voluble. And prone to a delicate kind of gossip about family matters which Regulus craved from the depths of his soul. 

I don’t suppose you know of anything, Lupin had written, which remedies a Black family depression. Sirius has taken to wandering the upper floors at night like the heroine in a gothic novel. He barely sleeps during the day, except when exhausted, and then it's even odds Harry will wake him in under an hour with a question or request to play a game. I have tried talking to him about it, but he keeps saying that he’s fine. 

Perhaps it is simply that he likes the freedom of movement, Regulus wrote back. When he was here, it was the physical confines of the cell that frustrated him the most. Moreover, his animagus form is a creature requiring exercise. Loath as I am to say it, would it be possible to visit a park and ‘take him for a run’? 

He sighed, and put the quill down with fingers slightly numb from the cold. Likely it was more complicated than that, but with Sirius the simple answer was not to be ignored. He folded his hands together for warmth, wishing for new clothes. The thick stone walls of the Azkaban prison did nothing to keep out the icy North Sea wind; he was perpetually cold and could only be grateful that he had not yet fatally succumbed to one of the persistent illnesses that seemed to spread through the rest of the prison population. 

Chills and fevers racked the inhabitants of his floor. Last month old Martingale had quietly perished in his own cell, unrepentant, as far as Regulus knew, for his nine separate uses of the Imperius Curse that had earned him enough successive life sentences to ensure he would never leave the prison. Regulus had carefully noted the event in a letter to Lupin, urging him to urge Sirius to once more bring the matter of building repair to the attention of the Ministry.

He picked up the quill, absently noting the smooth finished texture of the shaft. I notice that you did not mention Sirius’ proposal before the Wizengamot in your latest letter; am I to understand that it has failed? I understand the difficulty, and of course appreciate the changes Sirius has wrought in Azkaban already.

He stopped writing, tired and disconsolate. It was grindingly slow work, writing letters and waiting for the tiny incremental improvements that Sirius and the others in his party had been able to push through. Of course, a fire would be the optimal solution, and not to be thought of. It was at times like this that he missed his wand most severely: wanting the easy comfort of heat, or fresh water, or light, or anything else he used to command with a gesture. 

I am a muggle in this place, he thought, not for the first time. What is a wizard who cannot perform magic? I am reduced. 

Unwillingly, inevitably, he remembered the muggles, and how they had stared and then shouted, and then tried to escape, clumsy and pathetic. He remembered the way the woman had huddled over the body of the man, panting in terror, hands clutching at the dead man’s coat. Crying. He remembered the screams and the smell of the blood after it was blessedly over, and how he hadn’t been able to stop himself from shaking. 

They were muggles, had no magic. Caught up in a war they didn’t understand, victims of circumstance. And what was he?

***************

Regulus was uncertain. There was a large box at the door of his cell, wrapped in rough grey cloth still damp and fragrant with salt air.

This was an unprecedented occurrence. Within his four-year sojourn in the prison so far, he had learned that unexpected and new events often heralded unpleasant results. 

The arrival of the Crouches, for example, early into his sentence. It had marked the first time any family members had visited their kin dwelling in Azkaban, a favour repeated only twice and only granted for those close to death. It had been an ugly, upsetting scene that Regulus and the other prisoners on his corridor had watched with avid interest, for the sake of rarity. The woman had sobbed and sobbed and the man had been stone-faced, unmoved before the spectacle of his prone child. Regulus, peering through his bars at the very edge of the door, had seen him, down the corridor, refuse to enter his son’s cell. He had said nothing, and soon led the woman away, whose tears had also turned to frozen silence. Mere days later Bartemius had died without saying another word, his body unceremoniously dragged from the cell. Jugson, who had been friends with him at Hogwarts, had screamed for what felt like a week afterwards.

He was young and stupid, as I was, thought Regulus. We were not friends, but he did not deserve such a miserable end. 

The package lay peacefully in his cell. He looked down with misgiving at the grey lump, wondering. Letters had become customary, but there had been an absolute embargo on anything more substantial (‘Sorry, Reg--the Aurors say they can’t guard against wizards sneaking in dangerous items. You know one of the Lestrange cousins tried to get a portkey in via letters a couple months ago, it’s gotten everyone nervous’). With a sudden rush of paranoia and the kind of uneasy fear that had been less frequent over the last two years, he thought: something from the guards, to make life even more unbearable. The materials for suicide, perhaps. Why should wizarding England pay for the cost of our upkeep when we can quietly dispose of ourselves, as poor Beauchamp did. 

He looked at it, unmoving. It was at least something new, and usefully occupied his thoughts. There was something pale and thin on one side of the box. Cautiously, he lifted away a portion of the rough material and uncovered a letter, his name inscribed in Sirius’ distinctively terrible handwriting.

At that, his unease receded. That was idiotic, he told himself. Of course the package is from Sirius; he has won a victory against the Ministry and is at last allowed to send me something. A blanket. More parchment. New clothing, for the love of Morgana. While he had been becoming increasingly proficient at cleaning and maintaining his clothes, there was only so much he could do with thread painstakingly unraveled from a sacrificial rag, and a needle carved from an old pencil.

Gradually he became aware that he was postponing the exploration of this new item because while it remained untouched he could preserve a sense of dim excitement about it. Much like the letters from Sirius and Remus, it helped to clear his mind of that terrible dementor-inspired fog, and gave, if not happiness, a welcome invitation to curiosity. I will open it tomorrow, he told himself. And give myself another thirteen hours of imagining what it could be. A treat for myself.

He did wait.

Eventually, with reluctance, but brimming with curiosity, he opened it. It was a parcel, from his brother and Remus. It contained, lovingly chosen from his shelves in his childhood bedroom at Grimmauld Place, a selection of books.

***************

I know how you feel, Remus wrote once, early in the seventh year of his incarceration, when a February gale was shrieking around the tower. Every loose tile on the roof rattled under the pressure, and the angled slate gave off a high-pitched whine that made Regulus’ teeth ache. He put down the letter after reading that sentence, angry and disappointed in his correspondent for the first time in a long while. 

He continued to ignore it during the next few days, occupying himself with one of the more distracting of his current projects: a history of the Black family’s involvement with the political scene in early Tudor London. It was proving to be more of a challenge than he had at first thought, owing to the paucity of supporting evidence. He remembered great uncle Cygnus telling him and Sirius stories about their ancestor Archer Black at the court of King Henry, who had stirred up the artisans and apprentices of the city against the foreign Flemish workers. In one oft-told little anecdote, Archer had apparently himself led a mob of muggle peasants to kill scores of the immigrants, hanging them from their door frames. It had been amusing at the time.

Regulus sighed as he recalled how enthralled he had once been to know that his family had intricately entangled themselves with the great and powerful, and played the trickster to set muggles fighting against one another. Now, he merely felt dubious about the story’s accuracy, and a little ashamed. 

Picking up another heavy reference volume and propping it unsteadily against the desk, he sifted through folio upon folio of close, handwritten text in a particularly illegible script. Illogically, he was hoping for a letter, or memorandum or a similar document written some time in the past few centuries by another historically-minded Black. He knew this was foolish--while the majority of his family members were fixated on the family chronicles, the period dating from before the Statute of Secrecy, when his kind had mingled freely with the muggles, drew far less attention. His father had even warned Uncle Cygnus from telling the children too much about the muggle Kings and Queens, as if he would have preferred to pretend they did not exist. 

More prosaically, Regulus was sure that all the books sent by Sirius from the family library had been thoroughly checked for contraband. Letters or notes from a recognisable Black might have been confiscated as potentially containing dangerous magics. 

He rubbed his eyes, tired, but unwilling to try and rest. The gale from some days past had died down but the winds were still strong. When they buffeted the tower walls he sometimes imagined that the sounds he heard were waves, as if the sea had risen and was trying to drown the island, prison and all. He would try to sleep when it was quieter. 

Unwillingly, he looked over at the latest letter from Remus, lying neglected and largely unread on the floor. He still felt bitter about it. _I know how you feel_. What a ridiculous platitude, from a foolish, simple-minded creature who was only writing out of sanctimonious pity, and who likely didn’t give Regulus a thought most of the time, like Sirius, who had forgotten him, everyone had forgotten him, and he was going to die in this tower, alone except for books written by long-dead muggles, and he was desperate and pathetic and . . . 

The dementor was right outside his cell door. Regulus sat fixed in his chair, unable to breathe or move. It was here. It was going to get him. He stared at the thing, the hood and the formless shape of the body and the bone-like fingers of its hand where it gripped the bars. Please don’t, Regulus thought, terrified. Please don’t. Please. He heard screams, and low, guttural sobs, and smelled blood. Please.

The dementor moved away, and drifted down the corridor. It was gone. He was safe.

Taking a ragged, deep breath, Regulus half-fell out of his chair as he scrambled over to his bed on the opposite side of the cell. Frantically, he pushed himself into the corner and huddled there for several long minutes, trying not to cry. That had been bad. He hadn’t seen a patrol go by in nearly a week, and a dementor hadn’t bothered to give him such undivided focus in much longer. He wondered what had caught it’s attention. Perhaps I was too happy, he thought, and felt only despair. 

He could still smell the muggles’ blood.

It took nearly half an hour of wretched, mindless misery to look down at his hands, and realize that the blood was real. In his panic, he had snapped the quill in his right palm. The sharp, broken ends of the shaft were pushed into his skin, and the blood welled around the cut, running down his arm and staining the blanket. He hadn’t felt it. 

After a while, he was able to make himself drop the piece of quill onto the floor. Reaching down clumsily with his left hand, he found a fairly-clean rag and made a makeshift bandage. Later, he would make sure to clean the wound. Maybe it would heal quickly, maybe not. Either way, he wouldn’t be doing any writing for a while. 

Defeated, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, he haltingly picked up the letter from Remus. He felt obscurely guilty about throwing it away earlier, as if Remus would know and be angry. Hugging his right hand to his chest, he read: 

I know how you feel. At least, I don’t know all of it; can scarcely imagine it. But I have lived with pain and fear for a long time, and despite conventional wisdom on the subject, routine exposure does not make it easier to bear. 

At the moment of writing, I am lying on the sofa in the downstairs living room. My leg is fractured in two places and I have a new scar on my shoulder. It is the day after the full moon and I am so tired and sore that I can barely write this, but I have to. Sirius keeps coming to the door and hesitating, but he won’t come in, because I told him not to, because he has Harry and I can’t see Harry yet. 

I didn’t take my Wolfsbane potion last night. There was a problem, some kind of emergency at the school and it didn’t arrive in time. Sirius locked me into the cage in the cellar, the one made of silver, and barred the door. He used _fianto duri_ to keep me in, as safe as we could make it, but I remember hurling myself at the walls, at the bars. I could smell that there was a child in the house and I wanted to eat it. I remember that. I clawed all the skin from my right leg in my rage and desperation to get out. 

Regulus stopped reading there, and shakily lowered the letter. He was crying, he realized. It was strange. I should feel angrier about this, he thought. As I always knew, he is a danger to my brother, to my god-nephew. A dangerous animal. He could not quite make himself believe it, and looked at the letter again.

I don’t know if things will get better for me. I don’t know when you will be released from your own prison. But we can weather pain, if we have to, and I hope you believe that, and trust that we are always thinking of you.

Regulus inhaled on a sob, and choked. He pushed his face against his hands and thought, as he had nearly every day for the past seven years, of the muggles who had died at the end of his wand. He didn’t know their names. He had never been told. They had been, for his Lord, an inconvenience that needed neatening up. They had not mattered.

They do, and I do, Regulus thought, shaking uncontrollably. I am sorry. I am so sorry. Forgive me, _please_ , someone. I was wrong and I deserve this.

Please forgive me.

***************

It was thirteen years into his sentence, and Sirius was standing before him. 

This was not a highly unusual occurrence. Following the landmark 1990 ruling, Azkaban residents were allowed visitors once a month, and while most of the other Death Eaters had rarely seen any friends or family from the outside world, Regulus had been favoured with varied company. Sirius, of course, bringing letters from Harry to ‘his god-uncle’ in lieu of his presence (he was considered too young) as well as Andromeda and Nymphadora Tonks, Severus Snape, and Carmelia Brixton his publisher, although not Remus Lupin (werewolves were still not permitted through the gates of the prison, except in chains). 

“Free?” Regulus said, surprised. 

This was . . . considerably earlier than expected. Of course, he had known for some time that he would be released, owing to a relatively new concept called ‘prison rehabilitation’ that strangely enough came from the muggle world.

And he was a model prisoner: a wizard of good family who in the eyes of the public had committed less serious crimes than many of the other Death Eater inmates (which Regulus judged to be an abhorrently low bar) and repentant

He was also the brother of the man who had championed prison reform for over a decade and a successful writer in his own right, well-respected in the wider world for attempting to correct historical inaccuracies that had privileged pureblood wizarding families over the muggleborn and the muggles.

Still, this was early.

“Voldemort,” said Sirius grimly.

“What’s happened?” he said, narrowing his eyes at Sirius’ pale, angry face. “I thought Dumbledore was handling--surely, those horcruxes have been found and dealt with.”

Sirius shrugged, a laconic gesture undermined by the tension evident in his shoulders. “There were more, apparently. So he’s on the move again. Nearly killed Harry at the end of the school term.”

Regulus felt a rush of terror. “I--I’m sorry. You must have been very worried. But he’s all right? Safe?”

Sirius gave him a grin without a trace of humour. “You’ll forgive me not answering any questions about Harry until I know where you stand.”

So, Regulus thought: the ultimatum. The family he will fight for and protect against all disasters, and the family he can discard, if necessary. 

“You’ll stand with us?” asked Sirius. He didn’t look disapproving, or angry, or any of the things he had seemed when he had last visited Regulus in his cell. 

“Against Voldemort? I did that before,” his brother said tiredly.

Sirius hesitated, and made a gesture with his right hand, a spasmodic clenching and unclenching that looked, to Regulus’ eye, involuntary. “This is different.”

He was visibly tired, and appeared unwilling to explain himself further. Regulus found himself wishing for the calming presence of Remus Lupin. Despite the fact--and it seemed faintly ludicrous now, as if the stuff of dreams--that they had never physically met in person since Regulus had entered Azkaban, he thought of him as one of the most sympathetic people of his acquaintance. He would certainly calm Sirius down, he thought irritably, watching his brother pace across the small and crowded floor. 

“It is different,” Sirius repeated. “Because it’s not--not just against Voldemort. The Ministry are against us, you know; idiots. And a lot of people believe we’re just warmongering Gryffindors, looking for trouble. People don’t want war, they’ll hide from it. Pretend they can stay out of it.”

“Like I did,” Regulus said quietly.

Sirius nodded sharply. “Until you couldn’t anymore, I know.”

“You think I’ll sympathize with them? Stay neutral?”

“Neutrality,” said Sirius flatly, “is not an option.”

Regulus paused, at that. It didn’t quite ring true. Neutrality was always an option. If Sirius was being honest about the ruling, and he would be free soon (and it was a sweet failing of Sirius that he was always, incurably honest) he could leave England, after all--travel to the Americas, or the Far East. Let the soldiers and the warriors fight the battles, save the country. Preserve the Black line in his blood and bone. Live to see history turn again, and again, until it was something he could return to.

But he had learned something, these long years, about what _could_ be done, when there was a will to do it. “I will fight.”

Sirius grinned suddenly, and leaned forward, as if to grasp Regulus by the shoulder. He ached for the touch. Then Sirius stopped and frowned, asking hurriedly, desperately: “Are you sure?”

Regulus Black smiled and let the weight of centuries slide from him. “I’m not sixteen anymore. And I know now, for sure.”


End file.
